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The Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979 and the Evolution of the Sino

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The Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979 and the Evolution of the Sino The Enemy of My Enemy: The Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979 and the Evolution of the Sino-American Covert Relationship Sam Brothers Vietnamese soldiers pose on a destroyed Chinese tank during the Sino-Vietnamese War. Image courtesy of sinovietnamesewar.com. Note—I hereby give permission to Tommaso Astarita and Georgetown University to republish my thesis on the Georgetown Univesrity library website. 1 Table of Contents 1. INTRODUCTION 3 2. THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF THE CONFLICT 8 2A: ISSUES RELATED TO THE IMPROVING RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RUSSIA AND VIETNAM 9 2B: ETHNIC AND NATIONALIST TENSIONS BETWEEN CHINA AND VIETNAM 13 3. THE PROXIMATE CAUSES OF THE CONFLICT 15 3A: THE VIETNAMESE INVASION OF CAMBODIA 15 3B: BORDER TENSIONS BETWEEN CHINA AND VIETNAM 23 3C: THE ISSUE OF HOA REFUGEES 24 3D: CONCLUSION 26 4. THE FACTS OF THE CONFLICT 28 5A: THE RESULTS OF THE CONFLICT 39 6. EXISTING HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ON U.S. INVOLVEMENT IN THE CONFLICT 43 7. THE STATUS OF THE SINO-AMERICAN COVERT RELATIONSHIP PRIOR TO THE CONFLICT 47 8. THE IMPACT OF THE U.S.-CHINA RELATIONSHIP ON THE SINO-VIETNAMESE WAR 55 9. THE LEGACY OF U.S.-CHINA INTELLIGENCE COLLABORATION AND THE SINO-VIETNAMESE WAR + CONCLUSION 61 BIBLIOGRAPHY 66 PRIMARY SOURCES 66 SECONDARY SOURCES 67 2 The Enemy of My Enemy: The Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979 and the Evolution of the Sino-American Covert Relationship Sam Brothers 1. Introduction Despite the passage of time, the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979 has gone under analyzed by historians. On its face, this appears somewhat understandable. All parties involved in the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979—which lasted just twenty-seven days— have found strong motivations to forget about the conflict after the fact. The People’s Republic of China, which formally commenced the military action on February 17th, 1979 when People’s Liberation Army (PLA) forces entered Vietnam, suffered between 21,900 and 63,000 casualties (if Chinese sources are to be believed) from an invasion force of 200,000 to 600,000—all in a remarkably short period of time.1 As a result of these humiliating losses, the Chinese government has been active in limiting historical remembrance and portrayal of the conflict, censoring school textbooks and fiction (including an extremely popular novel, “Traversing Death”) that reference the war, with one historian going as far as to call the conflict “‘China’s forgotten war.’”2 Even one 1 For the 63,000 figure, see King C. Chen, China’s War with Vietnam: Issues, Decisions and Implications (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1987), 114. For the 21,900 figure, see an analysis of recent Chinese sources in Xiaoming Zhang, “China’s 1979 War with Vietnam: A Reassessment,” The China Quarterly, 184 (December 2005): 866-867. For force size estimates, see Bruce Elleman, Modern Chinese Warfare, 1795-1989 (New York: Routledge, 2001), 285, Edward O’Dowd, Chinese Military Strategy in the Third Indochina War, 3, 45-55, and Vo Dong Giang and Richard Falk, “The View from Hanoi,” World Policy Journal Vol. 3 No. 1 (Winter 1985/1986): 107. 2 Howard W. French, “Was the War Pointless? China Shows How to Bury It,” The New York Times, March 1, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/international/asia/ 01malipo.html ?pagewanted=1&_r=2&8hpib&oref=slogin, accessed November 5, 2013, and Xiaoming Zhang, 3 Chinese veteran of the conflict, when interviewed by Western journalists, stated that he was uncertain of the war’s origins.3 It is natural that Vietnam, given its prolonged struggles for independence in the 19th century against the French, the Japanese, and the United States, would assign little significance to such a brief conflict in which regular troops beyond border guards and militia were not even deployed.4 Similarly, the complicated roots of the conflict—which lie (at least to some extent) in the turbulent and confusing political situation within Cambodia at the time (which will be discussed in greater depth later on)—discourage further scholarship on and popular understanding of the war. Scholars have grappled with the significance of the Sino-Vietnamese War for the countries that were directly involved. After initially being an ally of both China and Russia, Vietnam refused to align itself against Russia, despite its proximity to China, and thus became an active participant in their geopolitical rivalry, an ongoing series of events known as the Sino-Soviet Split.5 As a result, the conflict marked a milestone in which the growing rift between Soviet Russia and the People’s Republic of China (which was caused by issues related to political theory as well as national interests) became more and more apparent to the outside world. However, the lasting significance of the conflict is disputed, with Zbigniew Brzezinski stating that the conflict had little overall impact on “Deng Xiaoping and China’s Decision to go to War with Vietnam,” Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 12 No. 3 (Summer 2010): 3. 3 French, “Was the War Pointless?,” The New York Times. 4 Peter Worthing, A Military History of Modern China: From the Manchu Conquest to Tian’anmen Square (Westport: Praeger Security International, 2007), 181. 5 Nguyen Manh Hung, “The Sino-Vietnamese Conflict: Power Play among Communist Neighbors,” Asian Survey Vol. 19 No. 11 (November 1979): 1038. 4 the Cold War.6 Works have been written on the significance of the conflict for China’s, Vietnam’s, and Russia’s positions during the Cold War.7 Similarly, the importance of the Sino-Vietnamese War for the regional politics and security of East Asia more broadly has been discussed by a variety of figures and historical works. However, the significance of the Sino-Vietnamese War for the Sino-American relationship has been hitherto ignored. Even scholarship that acknowledges the very existence of U.S. policy in the Sino- Vietnamese War of 1979 treats the United States of America as a somewhat peripheral actor in a somewhat peripheral conflict. When historical works do address U.S. assistance to China, they generally simply state that while the U.S. provided “moral support, diplomatic backing, and intelligence cooperation” to the Chinese during the conflict, and leave questions of the scope, impact, and coherence of that assistance to go unanswered.8 Even the few historical works that accord the Sino-Vietnamese War a large degree of significance are inclined to discount the importance of U.S. involvement and policy, opting to portray the U.S. as irrelevant, rather than a key driver of events. Substantial evidence indicates that this view is erroneous. Existing scholarship on the Sino-Vietnamese War that does cover U.S. assistance to China during the conflict fails to place this assistance in the context of the broader U.S.-China collaboration on a host of security issues that existed prior to the outbreak of hostilities between China and Vietnam. In stark contrast to the present day, during the later stages of the Cold War China and the U.S. collaborated on a host of issues ranging from intelligence sharing to technology transfer to other forms of security assistance. 6 Zbigniew Brezezinski, interview by author, 1616 Rhode Island Avenue North West, Washington, D.C., 20036, February 24, 2pm. 7 For once such work, see Chen, The Strategic Triangle and Regional Conflicts: Lessons from the Indochina Wars (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1992). 8 Henry Kissinger, On China (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 368. 5 This work uses the term “covert relationship” to describe this cumulative network of ventures jointly undertaken by the U.S. and China in fields related to military and intelligence activities during this time period. This covert relationship occurred almost entirely in response to the mutual threat that the Soviet Union presented to both the United States and China. In order to properly understand the significance of the Sino- Soviet War for the Sino-American relationship, and to understand the significance of U.S. assistance to China during the Sino-Soviet War for the Sino-Soviet War itself, it is first necessary to examine U.S. collaboration with China during the Sino-Vietnamese War in the context of this ongoing covert relationship. By examining U.S. assistance to China during the Sino-Vietnamese War in light of the ongoing Sino-American covert relationship—as well as the shared interest in curbing the Soviet Union’s global influence that inspired this covert relationship—it can be demonstrated that U.S. policy decisions, far from being tangential to the Sino- Vietnamese War, played a larger role than is commonly understood in this conflict. When China decided to invade Vietnam, China’s leadership was undertaking a calculated risk that Russia would not in turn commence military action against them. Given the state of Sino-Russian relations at the time, this was a very real concern held by Chinese policymakers, despite statements to the contrary that were delivered to the U.S. and others. It was U.S. intelligence regarding Soviet actions and troop movements that allowed this risk to be a calculated one, and thus facilitated the instigation of the Sino- Vietnamese War in the first place. Beyond the scope of the conflict itself, the Sino-Vietnamese War took the U.S. covert relationship to unprecedented heights. Because the Sino-Vietnamese War truly 6 put the Sino-American covert relationship to the test—with U.S. intelligence assistance to China playing a concrete role in supporting Chinese military action against Vietnam—the Sino-Vietnamese War in fact constituted a landmark event for both for the Sino- American covert relationship and for the Sino-American relationship more broadly. The Sino-Vietnamese War greatly influenced the Sino-American covert relationship, and in turn the Sino-American covert relationship continues to exert influence on the U.S-China relationship in the present day.
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